it's been hard to imagine what it was like for Dell to watch our secret
shopper series and have all their worst problems brought to light but after
today I won't have to imagine it and
neither will Nick because I paid five of
you to secret shop our store and I'm
sitting with the Creator Warehouse head of product Nick light to enjoy the
results firsthand we didn't tell him we were
doing this I say Enjoy because I got a sneak peek
and it's not all sunshine and rainbows unlike this segue to our
sponsor this is a star Odo throw away
all those mismatching apps that you're using to run your business with odo's
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we started with prominent contributors from our community then we picked two
more applicants at random from our Discord this was done to ensure that if
we misrepresented the experience we could be held accountable by these
strong voices each Shopper was given $300 to spend at LTT Store.com and given
the task of fabricating a reasonable issue with the order and Reporting on
the customer service experience to ensure that their stories would be
plausible we reached out to a disgruntled former member of the LTT
store team for some inside information
so there's plenty of issues that come up on the day-to-day desk pads that will
show up with marks and scuffs on them long shipping times is one that we would
hear about a lot there'd be missing items missing bonus bin items um the
free stuff uh water bottle Lids that would break
right here and screwdriver bit storage
that would be misassembled and would um separate from the rest of the driver
okay are you having fun yet um it's a
journey let's see how we did starting with secret agent n fact Checker
extraordinaire from the ECC Squad who ordered stickers lounge pants a sketchy
women's v-neck a screwdriver some bits and the big boy 2000 x600 PTM 7950
thermal pad right out of the gate it wasn't too good because na had a real
problem all right she didn't have to fabricate one the thermal pad got squished and
seeped out of the sides of the packet o oh not the best
okay I've seen worse sure not ideal it looks like some
of it escaped from the envelope and melted into the fabric ouch
oh so Squish and heat cuz the squish
like the edge seepage yeah not that big of a deal that'll still work if it gets
on the shirt sucks y okay here's what we said
so in regards to your T-shirt I would be happy to replace this for you at no additional cost as for your PTM 7950 it
remains usable in this state due to the semi- liquid nature of the material it
can be reshaped or used in an imperfect form factor as needed the pressure of
your machine's heat sync will ensure that all the necessary amount of contact is achieved for this reason we've
declined to offer replacement for this item we do not require you to send back
that effective merchandise please feel free to keep it or dispose of it as you see fit thank you for the reply and
replacement t-shirt I'm afraid I'm still not happy about the PTM 7950 question
for you though plof was she actually upset or did we ask her to hammer on it
uh I actually did reach out to Na and ask if she could be our disgruntled
customer ah disgruntlement but then when
the real issue happened and this was the reply she got back you'll see why she
was actually a little unhappy okay I'm
aware it could technically be used but the damage it suffered is going to make it more difficult than it would normally
be so it's not what I bought I know it'll work but I wanted this because I
thought it would be easier and better than regular thermal paste which is true
I think so far everyone's actually been pretty reasonable yep agreed
no okay well hold on a second so that was a Saturday to hold on yeah so the
23rd wait is the 12th a
holiday no so was the week following a
holiday oh boy I think if we were to speak with the support team the
reasoning would have been recovery from the holiday week taking a little bit
longer to get started on the following week with that said that is something
that we can actively work on and improve the imperfections will not affect
performance we recommend putting it in the freezer for a few hours to make it
easier to work with if you have issues with it let us know we'd be happy to
help as best we can record your thermals blah blah etc etc also correct it is way
easier to work with if you cool it down and it is possible that the difficulty
that she had working with it was because it wasn't cold when she was attempting
to use it I don't feel like doing PTM jigsaw is a fair statement you replace
the T-shirt without question now you won't replace the PTM 7950 if you accept
the T-shirt was damaged you must surely also accept that not all of the PTM 7950
is still in the packaging could you at least replace the 3/4 of it that is
damaged okay it took us a little longer than we'd probably like it's August the
20th by now but but it looks like we did send a replacement for the PTM 7950
although we called it TPM in this case um and we're going to send two actually
since they're working with a Threadripper just in case the issue occurs again in shipping we should receive a
new order confirmation and let us know if there are any other issues so not
going to lie I was a little stressed until I read
that I'm a little stressed still but here we are did you know about this case
did this get escalated to you or like it did not um but the typical escalation
path these days is not actually to me so we have a number of other leaders on the
team these days and that's not me shirking responsibility that's just me
giving an explanation I'm really glad to see that we did wind up dealing with it
we did wind up getting a replacement up to the customer uh and hopefully from
there they were able to utilize it without issue here's what na ne had to
say I've actually decided to give two ratings because there were two
experiences together and they were vastly different first for the real issue with the PTM
I'm going to give this a 2 and 1/2 out of five this was an unpleasant support
experience but the eventual resolution was practical and focus on solving the
actual problem instead of just blindly replacing the item I couldn't make use
of it in the state to arrive because of my physical disabilities in the end I
managed to convey this and support agreed that rather than replacing the whole sheet they would send two
additional smaller sheets to stand in for the areas I won't be able to use in
my opinion it was a perfect resolution because it solves the real problem while
reducing waste if they'd offered this the first couple of emails it would have
been a 5 out of five but it took 12 days
during this time there were several long waits for a response so rather than my
initial thought of three and a half I decided to dock an additional Half Point
the second rating was for a slightly manufactured issue with a t-shirt giving
it a five support offered to replace the T-shirt immediately without asking for
photos or any further explanation it was the easiest thing in the world and the
absolute gold standard for what contacting a support team should be like
it was so good it made me a little worried people could take advantage of
Creator Warehouse don't do that you know pleas if that
happens we'll have to revise our policies and it'll be a this is why we
can't have nice thing situation we like being able to provide no questions asked
Replacements if there's an issue with a product are you ready for round two sir
no but here we go secret agent Alysa an
active mod of our subreddit bought a mystery t-shirt three Northern Lights
desk pads two MCM Arch desk Solutions and a sticker pack I got my package
yesterday everything looked great but I realized I've got one too many med Arch
plates and one too few of the small Arch plates also a bigger issue there's a
huge red mark on my desk PAD as though someone took Sharpie to it gee Alyssa I
wonder how you put that Mark on your desk pad can I have some help with this
thanks for contacting LTC store see from oh this is just our autoresponder saying
hey we'll respond within the next 24 to 48 hours okay how long did we
actually God darn it we took 3 days again over a weekend
that makes sense okay so we do technically have some staffing over the
weekend but it is reduced so if you're submitting a support ticket on a Friday
you might expect to see a little bit more of a wait time and you know this is
actually probably a good prompt that we should update this to say one to two
business days rather than 24 to 48 hours it's also worth noting that we often
have big bursts in sales on Fridays yes so we can actually have an influx of
tickets combined with lower Staffing over the weekends Hey Alissa I'm already
here that received an effective and incorrect merchandise first I'd be happy
to send you another small Arch set to resolve the missing plates awesome
second for the deskpad we unfortunately do not stock any of this item so we
can't replace it for you at this time you ordered the last one Alissa at this
time I could either refund the affected desk pad or replace it with a different
size or design that we currently have in stock in either case you not be required
to send this back or send back the extra medium plates you received please let us
know how you'd like to proceed so a bit of context on this one this looks like
it would have been an order that came in during the lime Day promotion where we
were clearing out we cleared out a bunch of stuff how many SKS did we clear out
hundreds um so well not hundreds of SKS
but definitely hundreds of SKS no way hundreds of skus this is a little bit of
an outof theorm situation and as I referred to earlier we actually have a
number of new folks coming onto the team and who have come onto the team over the
last 12 months or so who are heavily
focused on nailing down some of these
let's say smaller issues that come up from time to time when we're clearing
out old inventory so moving forward I would expect this to be a a very rare
situation I appreciate you got back to me so quickly sucks I can't get the
exact replacement how about the W desk pad it's not the same but I can make it
work and our response said that's perfect we've created a new shipment
comp containing your 15 by6 W desk pad
uh we aren't able to send the plat separately so feel free to keep the extra small arches you'll be receiving
awesome as a rating for LTT in particular for me definitely five stars
the quality of the merchandise is superb I would absolutely order from LTT Store
again everything was a winwin in my books time for Michael secret agent
Michael's PTM 7950 also genuinely phase
changed in transit and looked worse for wear it wasn't nearly as bad as na
though so he went with the help the item I bought is too big approach now the
Marino underwear explicitly states that if you have a concern with the sizing
after trying it on to reach out to customer support so we did hi I bought
some PTM 7950 it seems to have melted I've attached an image also I got the
Marino wool underwear in medium since the regular medium fits great but it
seems to be not quite the same fit I was hoping to get another thermal pad and
ideally the Marino underwear in small oh
how long did we take oh God August 16th
okay and August 19th okay so Friday
y'all got to stop reaching out on Friday man you're going to kill poor Nick kill
he's going to lose his hair sorry to hear about the issue
what's likely occurred as the material began to slightly change phases during
Transit due to the ambient temperature that's a thing that's totally a thing it
is however based on the images provided your PTM remains usable in this state
due to the semi liquid nature of the material it can be reshaped uh the pressure of your heat sink will
ensure this is our uh one of our form fills uh basically this is something
that comes up pretty Reg regularly where somebody's like hey my thing melted and
we're like yep it's okay throw it in the freezer you'll be all good it'll be cool
literally it's the first two letters of the product name phase wait phase
tange first letter yeah there'll probably be some
Floatplane exclusives on this one or you know what no no no Floatplane
doesn't get a shout out today LTT Store shout out water bottle that's the old
water bottle yeah but I got the new V2 spout oh yeah cool you can get the V2
spout now it's better it's more durable see I can't break oh my
gosh can't break it for your Marino underwear your
exchange request would not ordinarily be covered under our returner exchange policy however given the circumstances
you presented we are able to Grant a one-time exception Michael said I'd give
customer service a five out of five since they addressed my issues quickly and reasonably considering I sent the
ticket Friday afternoon thank you for recognizing that they responded in less
than half a business day and I can't really ask for more than that I'm happy with how they handled the underwear and
I feel like if I did have problems with the PTM I'd probably get another one
yeah so I'm really glad that the team included that as a followup hey if there
are any issues please let us know trust us
bro he literally gets ptmd whenever I
say that next up is skoshi uhoh a broken clip uhoh skoshi
may have misunderstood what the common issues with the water bottle lid
are um yeah that's that's not it the old one used to break right here yeah that
is not a thing that used to happen you would have had to force that in fact I
think I can see the marks on it from where she forced it okay that's fine
that's fine let's see how we handle that I recently received my shipment and my
water bottle lid has not been staying on sure we said sorry to hear that your
lid has broken we'd be happy to Grant a free replacement lid future Replacements
can be purchased here in this case I mean we probably could have looked a
little bit closer at the picture and saw that hey this isn't actually broken you
just need to pop it back but to the
team's credit this is an ongoing issue that has since been resolved with the V2
you know oh skoshi said I would definitely give five stars as far as
support goes responses were fast and both emails I had to send effectively
solved the issue on the First Response without hassle it was easy to find the
contact us page on the LTT Store website which you can't take for granted these
days at some point we may have some kind of Bot or AI agent or something like
that but what I can promise is that we're not going to hide it which is what
a lot of companies seem to do these days overall great customer service and it
made me trust that if I had any actual issues I would be able to receive
service and I can speak to that a little bit as well so we are actively looking
into new Solutions as Lena said for bot support and the purpose of that would
not be replacing any of the existing reps that we have now or Trying to
minimize the human interactions that we have but it would be removing a lot of
the tier one one if you want to call it that interactions with support of
where's my order I need a replacement I want to get a refund those types of
things and then allowing our team to give even more time and effort to the
folks that have you know a problem like the first one that was addressed there
with the t-shirt and the the leaking PTM
so we're cooking a lot of things in the background and uh hopefully they will
Elevate The Experience even further on LTT Store last but not least we reached
out to the leader they accidentally ordered everything to the wrong address
but after intercepting the package they used a handy dandy Stitch Ripper to
sabotage our merchandise and send some complaints to the support staff at LTT
store.com warning long uhoh not great
not great that's not how that would come apart cuz they would have probably
talked to the fashion team about this this one's going to be interesting yeah
thought it'd be easier to just forward this to you my delivery address should be the same as my billing address Google
p goofed on that so unfortunately this St has received a shipping confirmation
it's not possible for us to cancel the order at modifi its address which is
true if it's already in the system then there's not much we can do I got
everything worked out I do have a question though why did I get charged
taxes on checkout only to be charged taxes from the Customs Authority in my
country have to say not a fan of being charged taxes twice this has been a
longstanding issue uh which is very frustrating due to how the ioss is
handled I believe it's called International One-Stop shop um it's not
actually that much of a One-Stop shop it it turns out because different Customs
authorities tend to handle these things differently and the implementation that
we have on our Shopify site um is
imperfect I would say um we haven't been able to find a solution to that so our
our standard policy is hey let us know as soon as you get a receipt pay those
taxes and then we will issue that back to you and then our our poor accounting
team has to deal with all the other elements in the background of of
changing the reporting there so we understand it's definitely not an ideal
situation we always do our best to you know be in line with any laws that might
be applicable to us be that tax or otherwise um quite frankly i' I've been
told by multiple people that the way that some other stores handle it is they
just don't all right he sent us the customs and tax bill and we'll provide
your vat refund immediately this will go to your original payment method okay
totally resolved but wait there's more hey there
I'm a little annoyed first of all you guys ship with parcel force in the UK
who have the highest clearance fees making my order cost more
my box was pretty beat up which wasn't fun either luckily nothing fragile then
it seems one of the t-shirts has some kind of a defect like look at this
sleeve sorry if I'm being rude here I am autistic and not always the best at
communicating I I don't know I thought I don't think that was rude at all I think
if you're a little annoyed then it's fine to say you're a little annoyed I think our support team would vouch that
in the grand scheme of annoyed customers this is on uh on the Kinder side and to
be clear the vast majority of our customers are very kind and very nice um
and there are many of them we're approaching I think a million orders
we're likely to hit that within the next few months here yeah and most of you are
so kind so we said hey I'm sorry about the issue uh could have you confirm
which shirt is having the problem we should be able to provide further assistance once that is confirmed it's
the color one it has a triangle on it question mark sorry to hear oh
no sorry to hear you receive defective merchandise it's not possible to replace
this shirt due to a lack of stock sorry about that and leave this to make things
right can do one of the following one provide a different product or color variant two a refund or three store
credit for the value please let us know if any of these options work for you the
only issue with store credit plus shipping is that I'm going to get slammed for the import fees again which
would make having just a single t-shirt order still end up costing money if I
get a straight refund will I also be refunded in appropriate amount for the
tax and Customs that I had to pay on the defective product and this one gets a
little bit complicated actually so we said at this time any taxes you recharge
from our store have already been refunded to you through the vet refund uh since we do not charge any other
Customs or Duty fees you would have to claim back any fees you've paid if doing so is allowable under your country's
regulations sure just refund the original payment method it was not an
ideal solution but I appreciate you taking the time to explain my options I
didn't mean to be rude have a great weekend oh my God there's more I have a
problem my cat spilled a beer on my desk
pad last night any chance you know how to clean it I don't want to ruin it so
we said uh generally speaking they should be cleaned with luk warm water
and a damp cloth in more extreme cases your DK pad can be machine washed cold
on the delicate cycle and then Place face up on the rack to dry obviously you
don't want to throw it through a dryer um given that it is rubber so my rating
is three out of five although this didn't impact my rating I do want to
point out that quite a few of the items I wanted to order were out of stock and
that made me a little sad we are working on that we're actively working on that
our skew count kind of ballooned over the last 3 or 4 years and we haven't
done a great job of managing clearing out the inventory that we just have bits
and pieces left of the LT Inventory management experience sale we had this
year cleared out according to Nick literally hundreds of SKS and then Black
Friday Cyber Monday which will probably happen after this video goes up don't
miss it uh is going to clear out a bunch more and then once that's done we're
going to try to maintain a more manageable skew count so we don't just
have mediums in this shirt and extra small and triple XL of that shirt and we
can keep things a little tighter actually Black Friday should be a little different than this year so keep your
eye out and sign up for the uh email list if you haven't already for the most
part I was happy with the support I received the first annoyance I had was a
complete lack of a support email address on the store website I understand
there's a contact form and yeah I get it
but we need to use a contact form because you can't actually rely on email
we had a lot of issues with stuff getting flagged as spam yes that is true
and to be clear you still technically can email the support email and it will
go through to our ticketing system we don't prefer that you do it that way but
um we want to make sure that however you're trying to reach out to us you can
um and that our support team can get back to it as soon as possible our
support team does a pretty great job all you got to do is go on the subreddit and
you'll find yeah maybe uh maybe we can throw in some some subreddit post here
of appreciation for the support team I would have preferred for support to be
done quicker especially when I sent an email about a change of address within
the hour of placing my first order and that's something that an automated
system could help with 100% but something that humans cannot necessarily
help with because tickets are always going to be first in first out so it's
not an issue of how quickly you sent in that email it's an issue of how many
emails were sitting in the queue already I would consider changing delivery
partners for the UK it was handled by parcel Force we don't always know 100%
which Courier partner is going to be used by our Courier partner and to add
to that even if we don't have a certain
career partner selected as part of our overall group that we utilize whatever
career partner we're using might subcontract out to another for certain
regions so for example some areas in Canada only Canada Post serves so even
if you ship something via FedEx it then gets passed over to Canada Post you'll
see an updated tracking code on Canada Post and that's who will handle your
final delivery we're not at the scale where we can have a UK office and
distribution center and an EU office and distribution center and an Australian
office and distribution center it's just not in the cards anytime soon but I will
say multiple distribution centers is something that has always been suggested
over the years and we're in a better position than we ever have been to start
considering things like that so that's not a commitment that this will happen
but just know that we're we're actively working on these things and and we're
constantly thinking of ways that we can serve you better as LTT Store it would
be nice if there was a document that explained how to get a refund on the import
fees yeah we'd have to have a different
document for literally every country and sometimes different regions in different
countries um we'll file that away with ideas though I
was a little disappointed at the amount of plastic packaging used for a clothing product since when are we still using
plastic packaging what item is this oh that's the Mac addess shirt oh and then
what's the one on the left I don't know what that is I thought we switched over to these glassing bags for all the
shirts so on a lot of our shirts we have
depending on the volume of the order sometimes we're not able to given the
the overlap of order volume and product
size oh he means the volume of our order from the supplier sorry yes the quantity
that we're ordering right of an item so if we're ordering a few hundred of
something that's more Niche and we go and like hm can we also have special
packaging they basically tell us to pound sand well what they tell us is you
can order 250,000 of them the products
though top quality stitching was excellent quality is amazing they're all very comfortable I particularly liked
the use of a range of people on the store to better gauge sizes I ended up
buying a size larger than usual thanks to that feature and everything fits great I give it a two and a half out of
five faster would help sorting out the issue with taxes and fees being paid
twice alone would have made it three out of five but what really bothered me was
the fact that I imagine many people don't realize they need to ask for a
refund on that point I've ordered previously and needed to request a
refund support is definitely improved since then on both speed and Clarity but there's still some improvements needed
overall then when we did good we did
really good when we didn't do as good but it's clear that there's some valid
criticisms um especially with our UK and EU shipping which we're aware of but we
don't have any immediate ways to solve like like once and for all it's clear
that there are some misses that we can give them better tools for so for
example when there's somebody who has an item that we're not able to replace
maybe there's some sweetener that we can add um to make that a little bit of a a
less negative experience may we could find some store credit or something even
if it's not a direct refund you know maybe we can do a little bit more to to
take that on our ourselves and and own that a little bit further so I think
there's some really good learnings from this um I think that we can definitely
make some really small adjustments like 24 to 48 hours to one to two business
days and and help just smooth things a whole lot um and I think that with time
uh we're going to see a whole lot more Improvement than we even have to date I
mean if we had done this 3 years ago sometimes our response times were like
weeks when you go from getting 500 support inquiries in a month to 15,000
support inquiries in a month literally from July to August um yeah
it's it's hard hard it's hard like this
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expert team hard like this punch to Linus's face if
you guys enjoyed this video make sure to check out more from our secret shopper
series we just secret shopped my investment framework we've secret
shopped the big players in the PC integration
space it's not usually this stressful
I'm glad you had fun I did actually and also I was stressed I don't know if this
is a net win for us or not I guess we'll find out I guess we'll find out